Progressive Geographies

Andrea Pavoni and Simone Tulumello, Urban Violence: Security, Imaginary, Atmosphere – Rowman & Littlefield, September 2023

Urban violence still has a peculiar standing within social and urban research. This book works to unpack the link between urban, violence, and security with three main arguments. 

The first is that urban violence is under-theorized because long-term theoretical problems with both of its elements (‘urban’ and ‘violence’).

The second is to answer these questions: (1) how can violence be conceptualized in a way that opens to an understanding of the specificity of urban violence? (2) What is the urban in urban violence? And (3) How can ‘urban’ and ‘violence’ be articulated in a way that makes urban violence a category with both analytical and strategic power? 

The third, and central, argument of this book is that, through a genealogy that articulates political economic and vital materialism, urban violence can ultimately be framed as a precise category shaped by three interlocking trajectories: the process of (capitalist) urbanization, the spatio-political project of the urban, and the concrete urban atmospheres in and through which the process and the project materialize, often violently so, in the urban.

Zdenka Sokolíčková, The Paradox of Svalbard: Climate Change and Globalisation in the Arctic – Pluto, July 2023

There is a New Books discussion with Stentor Danielson here. Thanks to dmf for this link.

The town of Longyearbyen in the high Arctic is the world’s northernmost settlement. Here, climate change is happening fast. It is clearly seen and sensed by the locals; with higher temperatures, more rain and permafrost thaw. At the same time, the town is shifting from state-controlled coal production to tourism, research and development, rapidly globalising, with numerous languages spoken, cruise ships sounding the horn in the harbour and planes landing and taking off.

Zdenka Sokolickova lived here between 2019 and 2021, and her research in the community uncovered a story about the conflict between sustainability and the driving forces of politics and economy in the rich global North. A small town of 2,400 inhabitants at 78 degrees latitude north on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, Longyearbyen provided a unique view into the unmistakable relationship between global capitalism and climate change.

The Paradox of Svalbard looks at both local and global trends to access a deep understanding of the effects of tourism, immigration, labour and many other elements on the trajectory of climate crisis, and whether anything can be done to reverse them.

T. Corey Brennan, The Fasces: A History of Ancient Rome’s Most Dangerous Political Symbol – Oxford University Press, November 2022

“Fascism” is a word ubiquitous in our contemporary political discourse, but few know about its roots in the ancient past or its long, strange evolution to the present.

In ancient Rome, the fasces were a bundle of wooden rods bound with a leather cord, in which an axe was placed—in essence, a mobile kit for corporal or capital punishment. Attendants typically carried fasces before Rome’s higher officials, to induce feelings of respect and fear for the relevant authority. This highly performative Roman institution had a lifespan of almost two millennia, and made a deep impression on subsequent eras, from the Byzantine period to the present.

Starting in the Renaissance, we find revivals and reinterpretations of the ancient fasces, accelerating especially after 1789, the first year of the United States’ Constitution and the opening volley of the French Revolution. But it was Benito Mussolini, who, beginning in 1919, propagated the fasces on an unprecedented scale. Oddly, today the emblem has grown largely unfamiliar, which in turn has offered an opening to contemporary extremist groups.

In The Fasces, T. Corey Brennan offers the first global history of the nature, development, and competing meanings of this stark symbol, from antiquity to the twenty-first century. The word “fascism” has universal awareness in contemporary political discourse, which thus makes this, the first book to trace the full arc of the fasces’ almost 3,000-year history, essential reading for all who wish to understand how the past informs the present.

Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt, Franz Boas: Shaping Anthropology and Fostering Social Justice – University of Nebraska Press, December 2022

I’m late in noticing the second part of this biography – the first part Franz Boas: The Emergence of the Anthropologist was published in November 2019.

Franz Boas defined the concept of cultural relativism and reoriented the humanities and social sciences away from race science toward an antiracist and anticolonialist understanding of human biology and culture. Franz Boas: Shaping Anthropology and Fostering Social Justiceis the second volume in Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt’s two-part biography of the renowned anthropologist and public intellectual.

Zumwalt takes the reader through the most vital period in the development of Americanist anthropology and Boas’s rise to dominance in the subfields of cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics. Boas’s emergence as a prominent public intellectual, particularly his opposition to U.S. entry into World War I, reveals his struggle against the forces of nativism, racial hatred, ethnic chauvinism, scientific racism, and uncritical nationalism.

Boas was instrumental in the American cultural renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, training students and influencing colleagues such as Melville Herskovits, Zora Neale Hurston, Benjamin Botkin, Alan Lomax, Langston Hughes, and others involved in combating racism and the flourishing Harlem Renaissance. He assisted German and European émigré intellectuals fleeing Nazi Germany to relocate in the United States and was instrumental in organizing the denunciation of Nazi racial science and American eugenics. At the end of his career Boas guided a network of former student anthropologists, who spread across the country to university departments, museums, and government agencies, imprinting his social science more broadly in the world of learned knowledge.

Franz Boas is a magisterial biography of Franz Boas and his influence in shaping not only anthropology but also the sciences, humanities, social science, visual and performing arts, and America’s public sphere during a period of great global upheaval and democratic and social struggle.

Midlands Conference in Critical Thought 2024

Centre for Policy, Citizenship and Society + Department of Social and Political Sciences, Nottingham Trent University

April 5th to April 6th, 2024

Call for Stream Proposals – new extended deadline September 25th 2023

Michele Lancione, For a Liberatory Politics of Home – Duke University Press, November 2023

The Introduction is open access at the Duke site.

In For a Liberatory Politics of Home, Michele Lancione questions accepted understandings of home and homelessness to offer a radical proposition: homelessness cannot be solved without dismantling current understandings of home. Conventionally, home is framed as a place of security and belonging, while its loss defines what it means to be homeless. On the basis of this binary, a whole industry of policy interventions, knowledge production, and organizing fails to provide solutions to homelessness but perpetuates violent and precarious forms of inhabitation. Drawing on his research and activism around housing in Europe, Lancione attends to the interlocking crises of home and homelessness by recentering the political charge of precarious dwelling. It is there, if often in unannounced ways, that a profound struggle for a differential kind of homing signals multiple possibilities to transcend the violences of home/homelessness. In advancing a new approach to work with the politics of inhabitation, Lancione provides a critique of current practices and offers a transformative vision for a renewed, liberatory politics of home.

Martina Tazzioli, Border abolitionism: Migrants’ containment and the genealogies of struggles and rescue – Manchester University Press, July 2023

Just an expensive hardback and e-book at the moment, unfortunately.

Building on an abolitionist perspective, this book offers an essential critique of migration and border policies, unsettling the distinction between migrants and citizens. This is the only book that brings together carceral abolitionist debates and critical migration literature. It explores the multiplication of modes of migration confinement and detention in Europe, examining how these are justified in the name of migrants’ protection. It argues that the collective memory of past struggles has partly informed current solidarity movements in support of migrants. A grounded critique of migration policies involves challenging the idea that migrants’ rights go to the detriment of citizens. An abolitionist approach to borders entails situating the right to mobility as part of struggle for the commons.

Ignacio Mendiola, El poder y la caza de personas: Frontera, seguridad y necropolitica – Bellaterra, March 2022

Este libro propone un trasvase del mundo de la caza de animales al mundo de la caza de personas.

A partir de este giro, la caza, con toda la trama de conceptos que la atraviesa, tales como el rastro, la batida, o la pieza, se convierte en el eje central de un relato que nos acercará al modo en que un régimen de poder se abalanza sobre las personas. Pero no de cualquier persona. El poder que caza se cierne sobre aquellas subjetividades que encarnan la existencia de un riesgo y, en torno a ellas, rastreándolas, irrumpirá la necesidad de neutralizarlas, de capturarlas, de expulsarlas. A esas otras subjetividades, que aquí aparecerán mayormente bajo las figuras del (sospechoso de ser) terrorista y del migrante, se las puede cazar y, acaso, se las debe cazar.

La caza de personas nombra una mutación de lo bélico impulsada por el discurso hegemónico de lo securitario, una forma de guerra en constante movimiento que busca dar cuenta del sujeto amenazante. Este libro se adentra en este entramado bélico, en sus condiciones de posibilidad, en su despliegue y en sus violencias constitutivas. El poder y la caza de personas nos narra cómo encaramos hoy otras guerras, otros cazadores y otras presas. No cabe duda que abordamos una temática singular que, desde el inicio mismo, conceptualizada en estos términos, habría de comportar sorpresa, cuando no reticencia. ¿Estamos ante un poder que caza personas?